[no title] 1978

Curator: This untitled work is by Patrick Heron. While undated, it resides within a larger body of work exploring color field painting, now held in the Tate Collections. Editor: Immediately, the materiality strikes me. Look at the varied textures, how the paint is applied, and the exposed canvas between the color bars! Curator: Absolutely. Heron, emerging from a post-war milieu, was deeply engaged in the debates around abstraction. I think he was trying to destabilize assumptions about color and its relationship to perception and experience. Editor: There is an inherent labor in that destabilization. We can feel the artist's hand, can't we? It's more than just color; it's about process, about the act of applying those strokes. Curator: I agree, and thinking about the cultural context, the work also challenges the traditional, often patriarchal notions of 'high' art by embracing decorative elements and challenging rigid boundaries. Editor: Perhaps it’s time to consider how the work reflects not just abstraction, but also the very economics of art production—access to materials, the artist's studio practice. Curator: An important point; I’m left considering the social agency embedded in these seemingly simple color choices. Editor: Indeed. It makes me think about the politics inherent in the materials themselves.